1. Technical Field
The invention relates to compound synthesis. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for tagging the synthesis supports, hence allowing constituents used during various compound syntheses, hence reaction products to be identified, and sorting the constituents used during various compound syntheses.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Combinatorial synthesis of libraries of organic molecules is an important tool for, inter alia, the identification of biologically active compounds. Such libraries may be generated on a solid support, for example by parallel syntheses at an array of spatially separate or spatially addressable constituents, at which compounds are generated as individual products, i.e. single compounds, having structural identities related to their particular location in the reaction array.
Another approach generates compound mixtures, for example by using split and combine synthesis methods. Such approach requires a deconvolution procedure in which the component of interest must be identified from within the compound mixture by repetitive synthesis of smaller and smaller mixtures containing the component of interest. Once the compound is isolated as a single compound, its structure is subsequently determined.
Chemical tagging techniques are used to record the synthetic history of each of the constituents of a synthesis pool to facilitate the subsequent identification of selected members of the library. In practice, introduction, removal, and decoding of chemical tags comprises a large portion of the effort that is required to generate and screen mixture libraries.
It is known to use transponders to tag a particulate derivatised polystyrene resin solid phase contained in polypropylene mesh "tea bags", and record synthesis steps carried out during a combi-chem synthesis (see R. Armstrong, P. Tempest, J. Cargill, Microchip Encoded Combinatorial Libraries: Generation of a Spatially Encoded Library from Pool Synthesis, CHIMIA, June 1996). However, such resin-based tea bags are not suited for automated sorting or handling, and thus, such an approach is therefore not amenable to the synthesis of large libraries.
It would be advantageous to provide an efficient approach to the tagging and automated sorting of synthesis constituents that allowed the manipulation of large numbers of synthesis constituents, and therefore the automated synthesis of large compound libraries.